This is a matter I have wanted to discuss for quite a long time now. The French embassy in
First of all, people beginning to queue for visas at 3 and 4 am is not just illogical, it is cruel and unfair and shows utter disregard for this nation and its people. I’m very sure the French embassy in any other (non-arab/muslim) country would not have the gall to treat its citizens like they have chosen to treat us.
Second of all, I know several people who have gone to that dreaded embassy only to be turned down without a valid reason, or without one at all!!! If you choose to reject one's application, the least they can do is have the decency to give an explanation for this rejection. Otherwise, we are left to assume *as I currently believe* that the basis for these rejections is prejudice. Do the people of
Third of all, who is losing in this underhanded battle? The French and their EU counterparts of course. We are all very aware that Arab tourism, if you can call it that, makes up a large part of the income these countries make. Our investments, homes abroad and simply the money spent there on our visits. We are a gold mine to these people...and making it absolutely impossible for us to enter those countries means that they will lose a great deal of income!
I urge my fellow Bahrainis and GCC nationals, please invest your hard earned money in your own nations so that in the near future our countries will be forces to be reckoned with when it comes to tourism and leisure. They need our money far more than we need to spend time in their countries. I hope this will be enough to persuade you to be proud of who you are, if they choose not to accept that, then it is utterly their loss! What do they have that we don’t or can’t have...not much but the weather. So please, I beg of you, stay home this summer...spend your vacations touring neighboring Arab countries. It is clear that they don't want us...so why do we need them. We DONT...none of us do and we never have! So as long as they choose to continue this treatment we have been receiving, I will have no desire to spend a dime in or on their countries. To all those who have properties, what’s the use of owning a home in the EU if you can't get to it or are only allowed to get to it when they feel like giving you a visa. When they have the deciding hand on whether or not you get to spend time in a home that you've paid for. Our government chooses to give them residency permits for as long as they own property here...and what do they give us....rejections without reason or logic...you're better off selling your homes and using that money towards the development of our own countries.
4 comments:
the problem is with people's mentalities here. They're not going to cancel their holidays to France because of a mis-hap (save a very bad one) at the embassy. They have to travel to show everyone that they're "classy" and "chic"
Travel to Dubai, Oman or Kuwait for the summer? Or even to Egypt, or whatever? IMPOSSIBLE! WERE TOO CLASSY FOR THAT!
So it has to be france. And london. And geneve.
Ridiculous.
I agree :S...people value their "show off factor" more than what is truly important in life...its too bad really...you can't generalize but on the whole, people here are quite superficial... :( tisk tisk
Hey Bitch,
It's not just a "show off factor", although that's definitely there.
Most Arabs- especially us Gulfies- seem to have this self-imposed hegemony: this deeply buried notion that the West, the "white race", is really superior, and thus the Arab strives to show the West that his people (or, at least, his own family) are as supreme, but also have traditional values and a sort of egocentric sense of "God is on my side" trump card to add to it.
It's all a big game of "compensation" for a sense of deprivation ("mit-kharaa'" is the local term), simply a cover-up job for a deep feeling of insecurity on a mass scale, and therefore all the "bling-bling" (here similarities to the African American can be found- also "mit-khar3een").
No, my great-grandfather was not an illiterate, dumb Arab who didn't even know what a an oil well was! Look my Mercedes is just as nice as yours, and mine has my national flag on it, so there!
The reality is, when Europe, Japan and America were cleaning up the mess that was World War I, our part of the world was barely developed (in 1918; less than 90 years ago).
As individuals, almost none of us were alive back then, but for a society, the cultural memory is as fresh as the memory of what we did last weekend is to us.
We weren't that much better off when the above-mentioned powers got around to the Second World War(1939-45)! Sure, Persian Gulf oil was discovered in the 1930s (in Bahrain first, funnily enough), but the resulting wealth took a long time to find its way into these illiterate people's pockets, and more importantly, into the infrastructure of electricity, paved roads, proper schools and hospitals. We didn't even begin to properly develop as a truly modern society until decades later (as I see it, this was some time after 1970, but you look at the history and the pictures and you decide when Bahrain stopped becoming an 'lesser-developed country', or an "LDC").
Peace.
I couldn't agree more. However, the show off factor and the fact that they are very mitkhareen and typically nouveau riche stems from the old injuries and inferiority complex you speak of...its really quite sad because instead of proving their equality in terms of intellect, they are attempting to prove it in terms of material success which is achieving the opposite affect...they need not prove themselves at all...why do they feel the need to? We don't have to change the way that they think...although it would be lovely to open to their eyes to the ways in which the world has changed...however, if doing so means showing them our wallets...I'd rather not
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